Some of the styles are not to my taste, but three or four of them are clean and simple and easy to read. They provide someone with no CSS a head-start. They provide someone with little design skills a head-start. How is this bad? (As for linking to a CSS file: the good thing here is that the authors explicitly offer them up for re-use. It's a bit underhanded to just find a website you like and "borrow" its CSS wholesale.)

Yes and no. It's probably better than nothing, but nowhere near as good as using something that considers layout as well, such as 960gs, jQuery-ui, Typogridphy, YUI, Blueprint, and so on.

The CSS, much like the markup used in the sample doc, is more "Here's my thesis" than "Here's my Web site/app". And that's clearly related to the age of content.

More Web sites should take the "Here's my thesis" approach.

I've been using 960gs quite a bit. It fairly simple (or at least it seems so now).

The basic ideas:

* Grid layouts are a Good Thing (see http://www.thegridsystem.org)

* Grids work best when used with proper proportions and ratios

* If you start with a fixed width of 960 pixels, you can get even divisions of 12 or 16 columns, with suitable margins between columns

* You can use CSS to set the width and margins of div elements

* 960gs defines CSS selectors to do just that, with styles for all combinations of column widths

* You can nest grids; 960gs has container styles (to contain stuff, natch) and grid styles.

* The 960.gs site has a number of example sites to glom ideas from

For example

    <div class='container_12'>
     <div class='grid_6 alpha'>Foo</div>
     <div class='grid_4 '>Bar</div>
     <div class='grid_2 omega'>Baz</div>
    </div>

And that's pretty much it. Work out a layout based of 12 or 16 evenly-sized base columns, and use that to assign the CSS class values.

Anyway, my E-mail is in my profile if you have questions. I'm no 960gs expert, but have been playing around with for a bit at least.

Edit: Just re-discovered this page

http://www.mostinspired.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/rip...

A nice demo page of using 960gs with JQuery.

So, 1: is there a good reason not to use fluid layouts? 2: What should a code guy like me do to minimize time spent designing prototype fluid layouts, before I'm ready to pay for design?

As I've ranted about before multiple overlapping windows solve more problems than they create. Give me a single full-screen window plus the option to occasionally tile 2 (or 4) windows for those few occasions when I need that.